How a Long-Distance Relationship Built One of the Best Lobster Rolls in the West Coast
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Food

How a Long-Distance Relationship Built One of the Best Lobster Rolls in the West Coast

A restaurant that specializes in lobster rolls and owned by two love-stricken Millennials (one of which happens to be Roald Dahl's granddaughter)? Only in LA.

How Silver Lake's celebrated lobster roll shack, Knuckle & Claw, came to open on Sunset Boulevard in March 2015 is a bit of a love story.

It all started at The Abbey in West Hollywood, when its chef-owners at the time—Chloe Dahl and Nikki Booth—met and sparked their romance. A long-distance romance ensued, since Booth was studying hospitality management at the University of Hawaii and Dahl lived in Los Angeles.

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"We both hated our jobs," says Booth, owning up to being "classic Millennials." "The best part of our day was when we were going out to dinner at night because we were such foodies."

Specifically, they had a passion for lobster rolls. "We were eating all these lobster rolls, and we couldn't afford to be eating as many lobster rolls as we were eating, so we started making our own," says Dahl.

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Chloe Dahl and Nikki Booth

They created a roll that straddles the line between the mayo-based Maine roll and the butter-kissed Connecticut version with absolute dedication to the seafood inside. Knuckle & Claw's split-top buns are baked fresh at local German bakery Röckenwagner. After being buttered and toasted on a panini press, they get a squirt of mayo, are stuffed with a quarter pound of knuckle and claw meat flown in daily from Maine, and then receive another squirt—this time of melted lemon butter—and a sprinkle of Booth's secret seasoning.

MAKE: Knuckle & Claw's Shrimp Rolls

The recipe was perfected after scarfing down those rolls in NYC, sampling more on a tasting tour of Maine, and while selling them at farmers markets in Brentwood and Beverly Glen in 2014. Throw in a successful Kickstarter campaign, and Dahl and Booth were able to transform an empty storefront into a casual seafood shack that serves rolls made with lobster, Dungeness crab, blue crab, and shrimp.

Of great importance to both owners, all of Knuckle & Claw's seafood is sustainably sourced. The lobster and blue crab is from Ready Seafood in Maine, a state that has long regulated its catch. The Dungeness crab is from Washington State, which also carefully regulates. The shrimp, in fact, is the only seafood on the menu that's sourced outside of the US, a result of Maine's decision to halt fishing since 2013 to let its shrimp population rebound. Instead, the shrimp come from the North Atlantic ocean in Canada.

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Seafood roll menu

Types of rolls at Knuckle and Claw

Booth credits Dahl's imaginative family ethos with helping them to establish Knuckle & Claw. "Chloe's mom has always been like, 'You can do absolutely anything. Nothing should hold you back.' And I think that's what gave Chloe this idea, 'Well, we should just do it.'"

Dahl has always been hard to stop. When she was a young child and living in Martha's Vineyard with her mom, Lucy Dahl (daughter of Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), a neighbor caught her devouring a leftover lobster on the porch steps the morning after a big lobster feast.

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Lobster and shrimp roll

"I woke up at 5 AM and I was hungry—as usual because I'm always hungry—and I left the house, went next door, found the back door was open, went into the neighbor's house, and saw this gorgeous lobster just sitting there on the top shelf of the fridge," Dahl says. "And I took it down and I sat on the back step and I ate that lobster from beginning to end."